birthday

I'm twenty. :)
It's 00:00 as I start typing this, so my birthday's officially come and gone. I can't say that I feel any older or wiser, but I do feel that with new realisations and resolutions made in the weeks leading up to today, this girl is now starting a new chapter of her life. (a new decade in fact! horrors...)

I'm inexpressibly grateful for all the phone calls from home, cards and immensely thoughtful gifts (all of which will keep me very warm through cold winter nights ahead :P) and the most lovingly planned surprise ever. This whole week, I've been feeling like the luckiest little girl, yes little girl, in the whole wide world. (Despite the cold, which bothers me no longer because of my happy presents!) Extremely spoilt as well, and so undeservingly loved. I would go into details but shall spare you and anyway it's all firmly printed in memory so there's no need to go on about it. Except to say again how thankful I am for my special and deeply adored friends and family. :)

Some say, what's the big deal about a birthday? But it meant alot, each and every single birthday greeting I've received. (So yes I really must start remembering other people's birthdays too!)

***

Twenty is significant, more significant than twenty one I think. My Japanese friend tells me that back home, a huge party is thrown regionally for all twenty-year-olds, kind of like prom, only it's a huge birthday celebration for everyone, and a huge reunion of sorts with all the people in your year at school. All the girls put on their best kimonos and the guys their suits for a night of celebration, leaving their teenage years behind.

So, calls for some quieter introspection?

I think what I heard in church this morning was very apt- about the danger of "ministry without room for vulnerability, spirituality without room for weakness". And it just hit home, what the rector said about how the world's success culture seeps into spirituality so that we feel like we must always put up an 'i-can-handle-everything' front to the world, when we can't. The staggering amounts of passion and agonising in the example of Paul while he "boasted" not of triumphs but of persecution and suffering, made clear to me what had already struck me during retreat. Pride keeps me wanting to put up a facade of "humble" superiority in all sorts of ways, when all I will ever be is another broken vessel slowly being pieced back together by a loving Father, needing grace, needing Christ.

"I present what I have before the messenger, the angel of the covenant, the Lord Jesus; and through him my prayers find acceptance wrapped up in his prayers; my praises become sweet as they are bound up with bundles of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia from Christ’s own garden. If I can bring him nothing but my tears, he will put them with his own tears in his own bottle for he once wept; if I can bring him nothing but my groans and sighs, he will accept these as an acceptable sacrifice, for he once was broken in heart, and sighed heavily in spirit. I myself, standing in him, am accepted in the Beloved; and all my polluted works, though in themselves only objects of divine abhorrence, are so received, that God smelleth a sweet savour. He is content and I am blessed." - Spurgeon (morning devotion 27th November)

I cannot but be amazed at God's faithfulness. He never gave up on me these twenty years, so as the lyrics of that song go, "I'll simply live, I simply live for You".